Kile Kucher, a Lansing graduate student,
holds up an Eastern Fox Snake at the Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge
in Saginaw.

Credit: Joanna Rogers, USFWS

Slither This Way

It may not be your idea of a dream assignment, but it suits Kile R. Kucher.
The graduate student at Central Michigan University is deep into his second
year of field work at nearby Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge following
a species that the state lists as threatened and that the refuge hopes to
better integrate into its habitat management program. In other words, says
Kucher, “I’m tromping around in marsh water that’s sometimes
up to my waist or higher tracking Eastern fox snakes.”

The boldly colored snakes can grow to five and a half feet or longer and
are sometimes mistaken for timber rattlers or copperheads, but, unlike those
species, Kucher says, fox snakes “are extremely docile; they rarely
strike or attempt to bite me when I pick them up.”

Why would he want to do that? To tag and release them. Or bag some for sending
to a Lansing veterinarian who surgically implants them with radio transmitters
that help Kucher track their movements.

Refuge manager Steve Kahl first dangled the idea before Kucher. “We
manage the refuge habitat primarily for waterfowl,” says Kahl, “but
we knew we had fox snakes here, and they were protected by the state. Other
than that, we knew very little about what habitats are important to them,
where they overwinter, where they nest, if the population is going up or
down or if they’re reproducing. We wanted to do some more investigating
to contribute to the snake conservation.”

Already, the project has produced some surprises:

On density: “I was pleasantly surprised to find so many of them,”
says Kucher. “I caught 50 the first year, and only two of them
recaptures. I’ve probably found 20 this year on the refuge.”

On overwintering: says Kahl, “One of the most surprising things
was that of the 14 snakes with transmitters, most overwintered in the
same location; two big shale piles from the coal mining era. Most had
to swim a quarter mile across the Shiawassee River to get to the shale
piles.”

On hardiness: “We had some severe flooding over the winter,”
says Kahl. “Some snakes were under water for weeks at a time.
But there was no mortality.”

Fox snakes eat rodents, birds, bird eggs and are threatened primarily by
habitat loss. People can also pose a threat. “Some people think the
only good snake is a dead snake,” says Kucher.